Pros And Cons Of Egaming As A Sport

Throughout human-history, sports continue to remain universal across all cultures, from 776 B.C. where the Olympics were held in Greece, to modern-day where March Madness runs rampant on college campuses in the United States. However, even after millennia, there is not a uniform definition for a sport in either the scientific or colloquial sense. Instead, there are frequent debates on what is considered a sport in bars and sociological papers. Specific to the United States, there are traditional sports that are never questioned, like basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. Other more popular activities like skateboarding are now considered a sport, but through the 1970s-1990s, it was ridiculed by those who held a traditional theory on what

Conversely, these actors and institutions can deter a potential sport through rhetoric and discourse that creates boundaries. These boundaries are: athletic versus non-athletic, skills versus inability, and ranking system, roles, sanctioning authorities, and rules versus chaoticness. For both proponents and opponents, motivations factor into whether eGaming is a sport to them. Proponents, either gamers or fans of gamers, want respect and status given to eSports. Nevertheless, opponents, those more traditionally-minded, have conceptions of gamers as “lazy” and are committed to adverse generalizations towards video games. These generalizations have degraded video games into a less-masculine activity than traditional sports. However, within video games, masculinity plays a key role where women are often ostracized and harassed for playing. Similarly, other aspects can minimize the legitimacy of eGaming as a sport and whether or not someone views itas a sport depends on what boundaries that person enacts on their

Rules for how games should be played also dictate success, another aspect that defines a sport. In the video game Overwatch, there are 24 playable characters with different skills and abilities. In competitive gameplay, a team is only allowed one of each character. This rule helps form a specific division of labor that is essential to winning a game. A typical way to build a team is two healers, two damage-per-second (DPS) players, and two tanks. One of the game modes in Overwatch sees one team moving a payload across the map to an endpoint, where the other team defends and tries to stop them. Similar to baseball, the teams then switch roles and the team with the most points (farthest distance moved) wins. For every win, a player gains points and can move up the ranking system, from Bronze all the way up to Grandmaster. How these points are allocated starts with ten placement matches, where based on performance, a player is placed in either Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, or Grandmaster. From there, players compete against each others with similar rankings like how baseball players are put into certain leagues, A, AA, AAA, or the majors. If a player was to leave one of the matches before it is over, they are penalized ranking points and can face timed bans. Overwatch displays how eGaming is not chaotic and has the ranking systems, roles,